Phonebloks Is A Modular Phone Concept With An Odd Ad Campaign

One of the problems with smartphones is that they’re inherently disposable. They’re simply not built to last more than two years, because at the end of the two year cycle, you buy a new phone. But how sustainable is that, environmentally or financially? Phonebloks has a better idea.

Here’s the video pitch, but if you’re at work, it’s basically a Lego phone. You pop in the parts you want, and pop off the parts you don’t; instead of buying a whole phone, you just swap out parts as convenient to you, or buy new ones, and configure your phone the way you want it.

The problem is the exceptionally odd way they’re going about promoting it. Essentially, they’re calling it crowdspeaking, where, using a platform, a whole bunch of people post about it automatically all at once. In other words, they’re trying to annoy you into awareness.

Which is a shame because this isn’t an idea that needs gimmicks. It seems like something that would appeal fairly keenly to nerds such as myself, who’d rather keep spare parts lying around in case something breaks on my phone, and that would probably be enough to get the platform started, and to spread as it became clear that, hey, cheap phone. Mobile carriers mostly care, these days, that you’re on contract, not that you buy a phone from them. It also seems like a slam-dunk concept for stores such as Radio Shack and Best Buy; a phone with components you can upsell until the end of time? Of course they want that.

So, hopefully this “thunderclap” or crowdspeaking or whatever doesn’t ruin this idea. A modular phone is something we could all really use.

This is copied straight from Reddit (specifially this thread: [goo.gl])

user CommodoreShawn writes:

Imagine your phone as a city. Components are represented as buildings, and they need to talk to each other across streets. Each component has different communication needs. The speaker needs to talk to the 4G antenna, but not very often and it doesn’t carry much data, so a two lane road is enough. The screen needs a lot of information though, so those HD youtube videos need a 4 lane highway straight from the antenna.
One of this idea’s downsides is that every component has to use the same size street, in order to keep them interchangeable. While the speaker may be fine with a two lane road, the screen will choke to death waiting for information to arrive. On the other side giving everyone a four lane highway would be incredibly expensive and inefficient.
Another downside is the fact that sometimes communication methods change as newer and better methods are developed. Keeping with the metaphor, lets say a new type of building is made, that can use a high speed monorail for fast transmission. Now you have to place monorails throughout the city (effectively replacing the base plate), and none of the old buildings would benefit from the fast monorail and you’d shortly end up replacing all of them as well.

Yeah, I’ve been doing some reading on this. Not sure if I care for CommodoreShawn’s analogy, but everyone with know-how seems to agree that this phone can’t be made as it’s shown in the video. At the very least, your CPU and battery would have to be in specific spots, otherwise you have a serious electrical engineering headache that’s not worth the effort. I’m not an engineer myself, but I do get what they’re saying.

It’s not that this phone is impossible, but it wouldn’t be quite as modular as they suggest.

You would have better success actually making this more like buying a computer, where the form factor and motherboard is essentially universal to the platform and things like processors, cameras and so on are variable options. That would be a much more plausible model. The providers would probably be more open to that model as well because you’re still buying a new phone every couple of years or so and re-upping your contract.

I think that works as a best of all worlds scenario. You get to have as powerful a phone as you can afford (or want), in whichever form factor you want (big or small according to preference) and if you’re feeling your phone is getting a little behind the curve, you can still conceivably get some additional upgrades instead of having to go out and get the latest and greatest thing.